Diana Carolina Hurtado Pulido
October/26/2021
CMPS 3160/6160
Group and work plan I am a graduate student, then I will be working alone for this project.
Description project and Goals
Currently, I am working on finding subsidence rates in Baton Rouge, Louisiana during the last two decades, and investigating what factors are causing subsidence using LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) data from 1999 and 2018.
Subsidence is the vertical land movement caused by natural and anthropogenic factors such as sediment compaction, isostatic adjustments, fault slip, and extraction or injection of fluids. The Gulf of Mexico coastline is under constant monitoring due to high rates of Sea Level rise and subsidence, which cause rapid land loss. The study area is not in the coastal area though it is subsiding (Figure 1). This area is of particular interest because there has not been enough research to determine what factors are causing subsidence. This area has two geological faults, grow of urban development, almost 2000 water wells (with different uses) active during the study period, approximately 40 active oil and gas wells, and 11 injection wells.
So far, my results show subsidence in the whole region (Figure 1). Surprisingly subsidence increases from south to north, which is the opposite of the expected results. Areas closer to the coast and water bodies have large subsidence rates due to younger sediments compaction, but most important in this area, the faults move towards the south. Interestingly, small areas show localized subsidence and uplifting, this behavior likely is related to human activities. Then, having these results, the main goal of this project is to find out how these subsidence values are related to groundwater extraction. Important questions:
Figure 1: Relative subsidence on Baton Rouge using LiDAR differencing between 1999 and 2018. Each map shows different methods applied to find elevation changes (Result of my research)
from IPython.display import Image
Image(filename="../../Images/GCD_raws.jpg")